Conservative Digg Cabal Uncovered

A blogger for liberal sites such as AlterNet and News Junkie Post has reported discovering a conservative group of online users who systematically work together to bury, or vote down, stories on liberal subjects and by posters they believe to be liberal, in order to keep those stories from becoming more widely known.

"A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites," reported the blogger, known as oleoleolson, who is the Senior News Editor and Chief New Media Strategist for News Junkie Post. "DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark."

The group -- which has since been deleted from Yahoo! -- also discussed strategy on how to either come back after being banned for life from Digg for violating the rules, set up sleeper profiles, and how to use multiple accounts at once without getting caught, which is against the Digg rules of one account per user, oleoleolson reported. Many of the primary posters in the group posted about how they had been banned multiple times. In addition, they attempt to have other users banned, according to the article.

Digg terms of service include forbidding the use of the service "with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the 'digg count', comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg's services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg's services."